The following movie shows the power of Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016. From the local disks, to storage pools and cluster, all the layers are explained!! Very useful when you want to know exactly how Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) works.

This whitepaper is written by Romain Serre and Charbel Nemnom which describes Microsoft Hyper-Converged solution in Windows Server 2016 using Storage Spaces Direct, Hyper-V and network technologies. The second part of this document shows an example of this implementation.

This document is written with my friend Charbel Nemnom which covers Hyper-Converged architecture in Windows Server 2016. This document describes technologies related to Microsoft Hyper-Converged model based on Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), Storage Quality of Service, ReFS, Hyper-V, Nano Server and some networking features such as RDMA, Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) and SMB.

In the second part of this document, we walk you through a step by step process on how to implement this solution on top of four virtual Nano Servers fully automated.

This document is with regards to the last Microsoft public information and the latest build of Windows Server 2016, we want to emphasize that this whitepaper will also be updated as we move forward to keep up with all the great things that is happening in the Microsoft CloudOS Platform.

We hope you find this document useful and helpful. If you have any questions, comments or errata you find in this whitepaper are welcome and encouraged.

Thin provisioning, UNMAP and checkpoints/snapshots are powerful technologies when used wisely. And to truly benefit, we must master them. This will allow us to better deliver storage and offer data protection.

While these technologies can be used at the physical layer (storage array), at the virtual layer (Hyper-V) or a combination of both, what we choose depends on the environment, budget and workloads. They offer:

cost reduction

operational benefits in ease of use

operational benefits in speed of recovering to points in time

operational benefits in offering data to Development Operations (DevOps) teams

This white paper will help you understand these concepts better in order to make better decisions for your needs.